Giving Peace a Chance: National Reconciliation and a Neutral South Vietnam, 1954–1964

Abstract

Early discussions of establishing a neutral South Vietnam started during the Geneva Conference in 1954. Vietnamese negotiator Phạm Văn Đồng met southern leaders, including Bảo Đại's former prime minister Trần Văn Hửu and the Cao Đài leader Phạm Công Tắc, who hoped to form such a government with French backing. These southerners pledged to open relations with the DRV, but they were pushed out of the picture by Ngô Đình Diệm, who with U.S. support became the southern prime minister and then president. Although these early efforts to create a neutral South Vietnam and promote national unity failed, the southern communists’ 1956 “Theses on the Path to Revolution” supported peaceful political struggle to unify Vietnam. Ideas of neutralism were viewed as communist propaganda by most U.S. statesmen and their allies in South Vietnam. Yet there were large numbers of native southerners who viewed the creation of a civilian coalition government as a desirable step, to avoid an American‐sponsored war on their soil. In this article, I show how these various neutralist groups, later known as the “Third Segment,” attempted to avoid a civil war that would entangle them in the Cold War.